12 Answers
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Dictionaries

Useful for finding definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, and examples of usage.

General-purpose dictionaries

The online dictionaries listed here are broadly suitable for native speakers, providing major definitions and examples, pronunciations (including audio), basic etymology, and some usage notes. Some are among the most commonly cited on English Language & Usage.

New Oxford American Dictionary — bundled with recent releases of MacOS X

Wiktionary — a publicly edited dictionary. Like any crowdsourced resource it can be easily manipulated, and its definitions and translations should be taken with caution; by the same token, it is likely to include neologisms and new meanings faster than traditional dictionaries will.

Learner's dictionaries

A learner's dictionary is geared to the needs of people learning English as a foreign or second language, for example, by providing notes on usage and common errors. Commonly cited on EL&U are the following:

Dictionary.com (Reference.com) — Primarily sourced from the Random House Dictionary for American English and the Collins English Dictionary for British English. Some entries also include additional material from the Online Etymology Dictionary, The Dictionary of American Slang, The American Heritage Idioms Dictionary, and other specialized dictionaries including some medical, legal, and computing sources.

The Free Dictionary - Primarily sourced from the American Heritage Dictionary, the Collins English Dictionary, and Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary. Most entries include thesaurus entries from WordNet, Roget's, and others, plus translation suggestions from Collins and Kernerman translation dictionaries.

Wordnik — Primarily sourced from the American Heritage Dictionary Fourth Edition, The Century Cyclopedia and WordNet 3.0, but notable for its lengthy lists of related terms and concepts.

Fine Dictionary— Searches a few popular dictionaries from around the early 20th century, as well as Wordnet 3.6 with quotations, illustrations and factoids provided alongside the entries.

Historical and dialectical dictionaries

These dictionaries may be helpful for researching word origins and formation, semantic drift, and historical and regional variations.

The Oxford English Dictionary (online subscription required1) — The sine qua non of historical dictionaries of English, showing the development of word meanings, including obsolete and obscure meanings.

The English Dialect Dictionary, being the complete vocabulary of all dialect words still in use, or known to have been in use during the last two hundred years..., OUP 1898-1905. Compiled by Joseph Wright, the EDD remains a standard in the historical study of dialect.

Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), subscription required - Based on extensive surveys carried out since the 1960s, the DARE is a compilation of words, phrases, and usages which are specific to a particular region of the United States.

Johnson's Dictionary Online — Covers one of the most known examples of an early dictionary as we know them: A Dictionary of The English Language written by Samuel Johnson and published in 1755.

Emily Dickinson Lexicon — It is useful for studying the poetess' work and early American English. It provides its own dictionary, and the 1844 printing of The American Dictionary of the English Language, which was the final print Noah Webster edited and published the year after he died at the age of 84.

DicFro — Provides a starting point to search other resources, like Wiktionary, The Internet Archive's scanned pages of The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia (CDC), The Online Etymology Dictionary, Chambers' Encyclopedia, Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary and a number of french and Latin dictionaries too. Some of the references are internally stored, but others are merely indexed or query an external site.

American Heritage Dictionary has two appendices that give roots of forbears of English words along with their cognates in the PIE and Proto-Semitic languages respectively

LexiLogos and more specifically its etymology center is a center for online dictionaries in many languages (the site is in French but that is not needed to use the site).

1 Many schools and libraries have full access to the OED Online; this is usually also extended to UK residents via their County Library Service or equivalent. The third edition is not available in print, only online, but the first two editions have print forms.

2 The original name, when it started fascicle-by-fascicle publication in the 1880s, was A New English Dictionary On Historical Principles, but by the time the last volume was published in 1928 it was generally known as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), under which name subsequent editions (including
facsimiles of the original) have gone.

Idioms, expressions and slang

There are numerous print dictionaries which focus on idioms, including various offerings by Oxford and McGraw-Hill, like the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions.

TFD Idioms and Phrases — From TheFreeDictionary, a searchable database of idioms from the Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms, the Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms.

The Phrase Finder — Provides meanings and origins of numerous English expressions and sayings, with commentary by Gary Martin.

Green's Dictionary of Slang — Renowned lexicographer Jonathan Green dedicated a life's work to the study of slang, compiling at least 55,000 headwords, illustrated by more than 640,451 citations. As of 2019, all citations and advanced search features formerly reserved for subscribers are available to the public for free.

OZDIC - Collocation dictionary. Enter a word to find collocations with that word.

By nature, however, slang usage is informal and ephemeral, and difficult to compile into a definitive reference. Most online slang dictionaries must rely on user input, with wildly varying accuracy and reliability. Nevertheless, they are much faster to update than traditional dictionaries, and have dates which help track evolution. Examples include the Online Slang Dictionary, edited by Walter Rader; A Dictionary of Slang by Ted Duckworth; and probably the most popular, Urban Dictionary.

Pronunciation

Howdjsay.com — Created by Tim Bowyer, provides audio clips of a "standard British" pronunciations of various words, with some alternatives, based on the suggested pronunciation given by major dictionaries. It lacks phonetic transcriptions, definitions, or other notations, however.

Forvo — An online pronunciation dictionary with audio pronunciations submitted and voted on by members. Its goal is "All the words in the world. Pronounced." It has excellent basic coverage of English, with more common words often represented in multiple dialects.

Urban Dictionary can be very useful to check first/early definitions and most popular definitions, but of course care must be taken.
– HugoMay 22 '12 at 18:40

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It should be noted that dictionaries published in the United States do not use standard Kenyon-Knott phonemic transcription, but rather an archaic, unscientific, and ultimately useless pronunciation system invented in the 18th century by Noah Webster. They are thus not suitable for non-native English speakers, nor for speakers of any English dialect except American English.
– John LawlerDec 28 '12 at 20:44

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Onelook is actually a metalink to other dictionaries and provides no definitions in itself. It is a great starting place.
– bibAug 29 '13 at 19:27

For a more classical Webster, check out: machaut.uchicago.edu/websters I consider the examples and etymology more useful, especially for archaic words and literary uses.
– The NateNov 14 '15 at 0:15

It is now, yeah. I haven't found a particularly good replacement site, either.
– The NateJan 6 '18 at 10:34

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@TheNate I already covered the dictionaries A.R.T.F.L. Project had with some other resources: Between Fine Dictionary covers Merriam Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (the 1913 dictionary), and the Emily Dickinson Lexicon has a separate tab for the 1844 printing of Noah Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language (a later version of the 1828 one). It's a shame to lose the website though, because it had good features, refined presentation, other features like an early Roget's thesaurus and some french stuff, and it was easier to find affixes…
– TonepoetFeb 11 '18 at 17:22

Hansard Corpus - contains nearly every speech given in the British Parliament from 1803-2005.

News on the Web (NOW) Corpus - contains billions of words from web-based newspapers and magazines since 2010. Helpful for searches on very recent usage, as millions of words are added daily.

TV Corpus - contains words from 75,000 television episodes from the 1950s to the current time, linked to their IMDb entries, and an excellent source for informal spoken language

Corpus of Online Registers of English - Based on research by Douglas Biber, Mark Davies, and Jesse Egbert, CORE uses more finely tuned categories for sources such as recipe, sermon, travel blog, or interview, allowing for greater context and insights into usage

Google Books - A service of Google through which over 25 million books have been scanned; while the visibility of copyrighted works is restricted, the size and relative comprehensiveness of the Google Books corpus makes it useful for finding usage examples and historical prevalence. The resource is flawed in that it makes no account of spoken English, and contains numerous OCR and metadata errors leading to skewed results.

Google Books Ngram Viewer - A simple interface for comparing the prevalence of words or phrases in the Google Books corpora and charting them as n-grams, as well as comparing results from sub-corpora (for example, comparing the prevalence of a word or phrase in British vs. American English). See the info page for syntax and FAQs.

NGrams can be embedded in EL&U posts by selecting Embed Chart, copying the src value from the <iframe> tag, changing interactive_chart to chart, and supplying the resulting URL as the image source.

Are Google Books/Ngrams considered a corpus?
– zpletanApr 11 '12 at 17:44

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sure, it's the text of 'all' books. You won't get the same kinds of things out it as like COCA or BNC. Also, NGrams has a number of difficulties: poor metadata (wrong dates/authors), OCR errors (FPs and FNs because of misreading), poor dealing with punctuation.
– MitchApr 11 '12 at 18:47

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The “general reference” close reason links here, but Ngrams are tricky enough to use well that I would not recommend closing a question just because it's possible to answer with an Ngram.
– Bradd SzonyeAug 5 '13 at 5:17

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Speaking from the layperson's point of view. I don't think the corpora are tools that your average user is familiar with. I have struggled myself to obtain the results I was hoping for. If there could be a type of "for dummies guide" then users and learners alike would be able to successfully exploit these reference instruments.
– Mari-Lou AAug 10 '13 at 17:03

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I think Google Books needs to be somewhere in the "What's a general reference?" conversation. (For that matter, perhaps Google does, too – although maybe that's considered too obvious?) In a question that says something like "Is throw me into the briar patch a common expression?", the O.P. should probably at least check out where it's been used in books before asking.
– J.R.Sep 15 '13 at 11:31

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The online corpora are fine if you know what you are doing, but can be a little daunting for people who have not used this type of thing before. Those wishing simply to know how native speakers have used a word before may be better off with fraze.it
– tunnyNov 5 '14 at 11:40

Style

The guidelines governing the presentation of written English are collectively referred to as style, and laid out in various rulebooks and manuals. The purpose of these guidelines is to provide a uniform presentation, to improve readability and as a mark of professionalism. Some industries, such as screenwriting, use specific formats, but any individual organization or even an individual publication can enforce a house style. If a writer has not been directed to follow a particular style or other guidelines, s/he is encouraged to choose a suitable style and be consistent in its use.

For example, there is consensus that major words in the title of a book should be capitalized, but difference on what constitutes a major word. There is consensus that the publication year of a reference should be included in its citation, but difference on whether it should be indicated with a comma, parentheses, or other punctuation. Hellenic, Greek, and Græcian are all valid words that can be found in a dictionary, but a publication may have specific rules for when each may be used. If a question asks about an area where there is broad consensus, it is likely to be closed for insufficient research.

General Style Guides

Of the most popular general style guides, only Oxford and Chicago are available online, and only with a subscription.

Fowler’s Modern English Usage (formally known as A Dictionary of Modern English Usage) is the most widely cited guide for British English usage, pronunciation, and writing, but it is not available online.

The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) is the most popular style guide used for non-journalistic writing in the United States. It is also accepted by most universities. Many finer points are covered in its free Questions and Answers blog, and Purdue OWL has a section for the Chicago/Turabian citation style; "Turabian Style" refers to Kate L. Turabian's Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, based on Chicago Style but focused on academic publishing.

Hyphenation Table: CMOS publishes a free, downloadable 10-page Hyphenation Table, which covers hyphenation usage for almost every imaginable word string at this link.

Practical English Usage by Michael Swan is a popular grammar and usage reference aimed at non-native speakers of English. It is also available online.

Academic and Scientific Style Guides

ACS Style, from the American Chemical Society, is widely used in physical sciences, notably by chemistry and physics journals.

The AMA Manual of Style requires a subscription; it is widely used in medicine and healthcare research.

APA Style, developed by the American Psychological Association, is widely used in the social sciences. A subscription is required for the style guide, but the citation style is accessible at the Purdue OWL.

IEEE Style, from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, is based largely on Chicago Style, but with a focus on engineering, particularly computer science.

MHRA Style is governed by the Modern Humanities Research Association, and commonly preferred for theses in UK universities.

MLA (Modern Language Association) Style is widely used in arts and humanities academia. Official MLA Style publications (the Handbook and the Style Manual) are not available online; however, an MLA Formatting and Style Guide is provided by the Online Writing Lab at Purdue University.

Scientific Style and Format, the manual for CSE Style, requires a subscription. It is widely used in scientific publishing, especially life sciences.

Journalist Style Guides

AP Style, subscription-required, is the standard style guide followed by major newspapers in the United States. Special derivatives and elucidations on AP style are printed by the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, but not available online to the public. A derivative called The Tameri Guide for Writers is freely available.

The Diversity Style Guide, a project of the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism at San Francisco State University, is "not a guide to being politically correct. Rather, it offers guidance, context and nuance for media professionals struggling to write about people who are different from themselves and communities different from their own" in its own words. It also links to identity-related style guides from other organizations.

The Religion Stylebook is an independent supplement to the AP Handbook, published by the Religion Newswriters Association, aimed at journalists who report on religion in the mainstream media

BuzzFeed's Style Guide, reflecting its content, may offer guidance on the presentation of popular culture or new technology not covered by other guides.

Governmental Style Guides

Note: No government of any major English-speaking country attempts to enforce English style or usage as a matter of law or regulation. These guides are published mainly for writers in the employ of the respective governmental office or body.

Other

Older style guides tend to be strongly prescriptive, that is, flatly asserting that certain usages are wrong even if they are widely used and well-understood. Some recommendations or cautions have been transformed and transmitted over the years as "rules" that are rejected by professional writers and linguists alike, such as the prejudice against the passive voice or against ending sentences with prepositions. Therefore, writers must be cautious about the stylistic advice given in popular guides like Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, or older editions of Fowler's.

Grammar and Style are completely different categories and should have separate entries. The last three entries on the list above contain no useful information on English grammar, and to say that Strunk and White "has too many controversial rules to be definitive" is a massive understatement.
– John LawlerMay 18 '12 at 18:46

@JohnLawler: Thanks for your comments...please feel free to edit. I realize that grammar and style are not the same, but there is somewhat of a tendency to lump them together. Also, I didn't feel like there were enough entries for either to warrant a single entry. If you know of other resources, please add.
– MitchMay 18 '12 at 19:29

The category, Usage Guides (different from either style or grammar guides) might be useful. This would include Fowler (noted above) and the American equivalent, Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage . (books.google.co.uk/books?id=2yJusP0vrdgC)
– Robin HamiltonJun 15 '17 at 22:36

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Why is the Chicago Manual of Style not listed as an Academic Style Guideline? It is produced by a university in service of it's academic press. Sure it's widely used, but so is MLA and APA style.
– Stella BidermanNov 27 '17 at 18:14

@Mitch do you think it's a better idea to list Chicago as an academic style, or MLA and APA as general style guidelines. All three are widely used outside of academia, and I was taught them in US public elementary school. The question is if this division of style guides is by who uses them or who produces them. I would be in favor of saying that we should go by use, not production, and move MLA and APA to the general style guidelines section
– Stella BidermanNov 27 '17 at 18:28

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@StellaBiderman Oops, I didn't notice that CMS already exists, and you're asking if it would be appropriate to move it to a different subsection. I personally associate MLA and APA with academic writing, and CMS with general writing. There will always be overlap, but I think the categorization is useful. If you have an article to write for a client, you should use whatever style guide they say, even if it turns out to be universally scorned S&W. It's no crime to use MLA/APA outside of academia even though they are most commonly associated with those areas.
– MitchNov 27 '17 at 18:37

Grammar

McCawley's The Syntactic Phenomena of English. It turns out that the first three chapters of this classic 1998 grammar are available free on Google Books. The rest of the book is not.

This seems to be very good marketing for University of Chicago Press, or whoever made this decision, because it gives a good and useful sample of what's in the book. The first three chapters are the general ones, where the author lays out the methodology, definitions, examples, and tests for syntax. They're all most people need to read; the other chapters are specialized on individual construction types and other issues.

There are useful tree diagrams and excellent example sentences throughout. Anyone familiar with what's in these three chapters has gone a long way toward mastering English syntax.

McCawley's book is very clear, but it is a technical scientific work intended as a college textbook for a year-long course. It's not necessary to understand linguistics to benefit from the book; however, readers will have to understand that spoken English is what grammar, and therefore this book, is about. There is no treatment of spelling, punctuation, or "correct" grammar, for instance; these are not syntactic phenomena, but social ones.

Pullum and Huddleston's Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. This gigantic (1860 pages) and magisterial reference book was published in 2002.

Huddleston and Pullum covers everything -- including, for example, a chapter on punctuation by Geoffrey Nunberg -- and introduces a number of terminological innovations that may become widely-accepted in a while; my advice is to be wary of the terminology -- learn it, and learn the alternative terms as well. They are discussed as they are introduced.

E.g, what McCawley calls a "restrictive relative clause", Pullum and Huddleston call an "essential relative clause"; what McC calls a "particle" up in phrasal verbs like pick up, P&H call an "intransitive preposition" up. You will find both sets of terms (among many others, from all over the world) used here on EL&U.

Substitute term, anyway. I understand Geoff's reasoning, and I like the idea of intransitive prepositions; but the more terminology is introduced, the denser the reading becomes, because you're always having to remember what's what.
– John LawlerJul 16 '15 at 23:29

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Are you seriously saying that for a question to not be 'off topic', it needs to not be answered somewhere in the 1856 pages of CGEL? Wouldn't this make this forum something like "Bafflingly Obscure Questions That Have Never Been Tackled Publicly In The Prior History Of Grammar and Linguistics"? Is that the true intention of this forum? (By the way, the link you give doesn't work.)
– DunsanistJun 20 '16 at 10:12

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@Dunsanist: No, I don't seriously mean that, because I can't understand what it means. There are at least three negatives in in order for a question to not be "off topic", it needs to not be answered in .. CGEL. As Horn says, "Duplex negatio confirmat; triplex negatio confusat." I'm not interested in whether something is 'off topic' here or not, since there are very few useful or consistent standards for that designation. It's political, not intellectual.
– John LawlerJun 20 '16 at 14:25

Okay, "Is a question 'off topic' if the answer can be deduced by consulting the 1856 pages of CGEL?" As for 'political'--I would read 'arbitrary', and looking at questions on this forum many are plaintive ones along the lines of "Why was I off topic?"
– DunsanistJun 23 '16 at 14:49

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@Dunsanist: don't ask me. I don't know. And I don't care. This is a free service, and its standards are its own business. The problem seems (to me) to be that there are way too many junk questions -- you can make your own definitions -- and it would seem fair if there were some non-judgemental way to get them out of the way. But there isn't any, though people keep trying.
– John LawlerJun 23 '16 at 15:10

Is there a legal pdf version of Cambridge Grammar of the English Language that is "available online", or is @JohnLawler (and perhaps ELU) recommending the use of an illegal version of the work?
– Alan CarmackSep 18 '16 at 14:06

Why does it have to be online? 1852 pages is small enough to hold in your lap.
– John LawlerSep 18 '16 at 16:53

@AlanCarmack: "Is there a legal pdf version of Cambridge Grammar of the English Language that is available online". No, it's not available as an eBook yet. But you can make a request.
– MoriDec 11 '16 at 5:25

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Quite a few questions on ELU result in non-junk answers which however depend not just on particular grammarians' terminology, but also their analyses. sadly, the answers are often given as being indisputable. Is there a resource spelling out major differences between the more respected grammar books available (including those by Quirk et al, Aarts ...)? A criticism showing weaknesses?
– Edwin AshworthJan 27 '18 at 13:37

Are websites such as Grammar Girl and those belonging to university writing centers considered reputable enough for EL&U?
– miltonautDec 1 '18 at 1:07

Grammar Girl isn't. Mignon Fogarty is a nice person and a decent writer, but she's not a linguist or a grammarian -- unless you want to define "grammarian" as somebody who gives grammar advice -- and her advice is often superficial. University writing sites vary enormously, just like writing. Many of them are just pushing the old Latinate zombie rules because they're meant for native speakers who take English's lexical and syntactic complexity as natural, and never mention the actual grammar that learners need to know. In general, anything you read about English grammar on the Web, doubt it.
– John LawlerDec 1 '18 at 16:58

IATE - provides official translations of terminology as used by EU institutions, maintained by the Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union.

Termium Plus - provides official translations of the Canadian government into Canadian English and Canadian French

Machine Translations

Machine translations are generated by computer software which compares parallel texts produced by human translators and attempts to identify patterns and apply them to submitted text. The result can be helpful for short, simple text, but is often inaccurate, unidiomatic, or flat-out incorrect, and so should be used with caution.

These are books of possible interest to people who are investigating word and phrase origins and want to know what meanings those words or phrase were said to have at various times in the past. Several of them do not show up in a direct Google Books search for them by title; I've run into the hidden ones by chance, while searching for a particular word or phrase that they happen to contain.

If a resource list of this type is indeed of interest to other EL&U users, I will supplement this answer with lists of old slang dictionaries, proverb collections, and British regional glossaries that I have come across over several years of researching questions asked at this site.
– Sven YargsDec 16 '16 at 23:02

The redundancy in these entries is hurting both my eyes and the engineering part of my brain. Would you mind if I edited to, for example, have a single entry for Sam Johnson, with two links, one for each volume?
– MitchMay 8 '17 at 21:53

@Mitch: The reason I included multiple editions for various dictionaries is so that people trying to establish how a definition changed over time or when a word first appeared in one of these series will be able to take a fairly granular approach to those questions. Many definitions remain the same from edition to edition, of course, but some change, and how they change can be interesting (to me). But I already have all of these links, so I don't need it. If you think that EL&U users are likely to find a list with one edition of each title more useful than a list with multiple editions...
– Sven YargsMay 9 '17 at 0:31

...spread across multiple decades, I'm not inclined to argue the point. I suppose that each of us tends to provide the material that seems personally most useful—and in my case, that isn't a good guide to how other people see things. So, this being a community wiki question and answer, I think you should feel as unconstrained in altering my answer as I felt in posting it.
– Sven YargsMay 9 '17 at 0:34

done. feel free to judge and roll back if desired
– MitchMay 9 '17 at 1:59

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Your revised layout looks great, Mitch. I had imagined that you wanted to cut the entries back to a single link per dictionary, but you've retained all the links and yet made them much cleaner and easier to identify by date and edition. Thanks very much for the improved presentation.
– Sven YargsMay 9 '17 at 2:08

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@Sven Yargs The list of pre-1800 slang dictionaries would run: Harman (1567); Dekker (1608); Richard Head (1665 and 1672); B.E. (1699); New Canting Dictionary (1725); Grose (1785 and later editions). Grose splits into Grose 1-3 (the three which Francis Grose was himself responsible for); 1812 ("buckish slang") and 1823 (Egan). All of these are available in one form or another online. I could provide links, if you think these would be useful.
– Robin HamiltonJun 15 '17 at 22:19

Okay, I guess I should have added my answers here instead of above in the comments. So, I'll try again.

Dictionary.com gives all the source references on one page, from English and slang to science, computing, and medical dictionaries, including History and Origin, all from specific dictionaries. It includes nearby words, related searches, and all words from the root.

RhymeZone.com gives rhymes, thesaurus, similar sounding words, quotations, homophones, letter matching search, pictures, and even Shakespeare references. It has links to the Bible books, and famous quotes, and several links to specific genres produced by Shakespeare. I use this site almost daily.

The Purdue OWL is an Online Writing Lab for tutoring or learning to writing well in English. I recommend taking a look, also, at the OWL site map to see the range of subjects covered.

I recommend the site EngVid for clearing up questions about grammar rules, and other English language dilemmas. There are videos for over 500 subjects on that site, all related to English. Some people learn better through watching demonstrations on whiteboard. These videos work well for tutoring, too.

I also believe you need a link to the Middle English Dictionary. It may be an obscure language, but we still study the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, and John Gower's Confessio Amantis.